Vladimir lenin quotes

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions.

Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action. A plenary meeting of the Soviet must be called to decide on mass searches in Petrograd and the goods stations. To carry out these searches, each factory and company must form contingents, not on a voluntary basis: it must be the duty of everyone to take part in these searches under the threat of being deprived of his bread card. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.

No Marxist can deny that the interests of socialism are higher than the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.

The goal of socialism is communism.

Those who are opposed to armed uprising ... must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards.

Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.

We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not "in the name of capitalism," but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.

It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.

Trust is good, but control is better.

Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.

By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

One cannot live in society and be free from society.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.

One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.

A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.

As an ultimate objective, "peace" simply means communist world control.

He who does not work shall not eat

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.

You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms.

We do not have time to play at "oppositions" at "conferences." We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as "nonparty," in prison.

No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!

We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters -- then we are for it!

Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

Capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.

Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

All contemporary religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization, Marxism has always viewed as organs of bourgeois reaction, serving as a defense of exploitation and the doping of the working-classes.

Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.

I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practicing moral self-purification; I don't eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.

A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.

One must always try to be as radical as reality itself.

We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles.

It is not national interests we are upholding - we claim that the interests of socialism, the interests of world socialism, rank higher than national interests, higher than the interests of the state. We are defenders of the socialist fatherland.

We are not shooting enough professors.

Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this.

Learning is never done without errors and defeat.

We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general.

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.

Perfect definition of atheist dogma. Your mind has been subjected to subtle mental conditioning year after year. Now the atheist lie has become the truth to you. A lie that can be blown away with the real truth. It just takes time to unwind the atheist mental conditioning. The truth is out there. Outside of atheist dogma lies the truth!

Three keys to success: read, read, read.

You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice.

The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy's cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.

It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror.

For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary.

The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without violent revolution.

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.

The true leader must submerge himself in the fountain of the people.

I don't care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.

The Jewish bourgeoisie are our enemies, not as Jews but as bourgeoisie. The Jewish worker is our brother.

The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation.

Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.

Germany will militarize herself out of existence, England will expand herself out of existence, and America will spend herself out of existence.

War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.

One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class.

Sometimes - history needs a push.

Bah, tombstones are only good for pigeons to sit on

But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into smaller states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.

How can you make a revolution without executions?

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.

The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.

Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.

America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.

Truth is the most precious thing. That's why we should ration it.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich -- that is the democracy of capitalist society.

We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.

When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

One fool can ask more questions in a minute than 12 wise men can answer in an hour.

Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ...Find tougher people.

Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.

The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even - if need be - to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work in them at all costs.

Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.

You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations -- all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.

Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.

When it comes to hang the capitalists they will compete with each other to sell us the rope at a lower price.

The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.

But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on.

It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

Don't be afraid to admit defeat. Learn from defeat. Do over again more thoroughly, more carefully, and more systematically what you have done badly.

Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.

There can be nothing more abominable than religion.

The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament.

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

But I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.

It is in prison ... that one becomes a real revolutionary.

People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.

It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.